Conan O’Brien is mourning the loss of his parents. On Monday, Dec. 9, the former late-night talk show host’s father, Dr. Thomas O’Brien, passed away at age 95 after his health “had been failing.” Just three days later, on Thursday, Dec. 12, Conan’s mother, Ruth Reardon O’Brien, passed away “peacefully” at age 92. The couple both died at their Brookline, Massachusetts home, according to The Boston Globe.
Speaking with the Globe about his parents, Conan, 61, said his father – an epidemiologist who pioneered antibiotic resistance research – “had a voracious appetite for ideas and people and the crazy variety and irony of life. He wanted to go everywhere, meet everybody, see everything, taste everything.”
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“Science has said there’s no such thing as perpetual motion, but my father was proof that that was wrong,” the Saturday Night Live alum added. “My father was in constant motion. And he was interested in everything — absolutely everything.”
Conan credited his father with instilling a love of comedy in his children. According to the Globe, Thomas made sure his children knew comedy’s classics, and introduced them to Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers’ movies.
“The loudest I’ve ever heard anybody laugh was sitting next to him in a theater watching Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther movie,” Conan recalled, adding that “he was often the funniest guy in the room. And when he would laugh, his whole body would convulse and he would almost hug himself.”
“For the rest of my time on earth I will be hearing from people who want to talk with me about my dad,” Conan continued. “I’ve never met anyone like him, and he happens to be my father. If I met him randomly in a hotel lobby, I’d think, ‘Who the hell is this guy? He’s the most interesting person I’ve ever met.’”
Conan’s mother, meanwhile, was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, per an online obituary. After graduating from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1953, she served as a law clerk for Raymond Wilkins, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In 1978, she was named the second woman partner at Ropes & Gray law firm, where she continued to work until her retirement in 1996.
Thomas and Ruth met through college classmates and married in 1958, per the Globe, and were married for 66 years. A funeral mass for the couple is scheduled to be held in Boston on Wednesday, Dec. 18.
